


Simplicity

by pinstripedJackalope



Series: You Are That Which I Worship [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Character Study, Crusades, Enemies, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Gen, Gender Issues, Historical Inaccuracy, I did my best, Introspection, Minor Character Death, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Priest Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Temporary Character Death, Trans Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, as canon compliant as i could make it without knowing the comics, but it's implied, i don't know how to tag the relationship rip, not in this one, or knowing anything about the crusades, they're still kind of enemies at the end, with canon and everything, you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:07:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27804289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: When Nicolò was five, he thought the world a simple place.  When Nicolò was fourteen, he thought the world an enormous place.  When Nicolò was twenty, he thought the world a complicated place.  When Nicolò was twenty-five, he thought the world a harsh place.  When Nicolò was twenty-seven, he thought the world a sinful place.Nicolò is now twenty-eight.  He doesn’t know what to make of the world anymore.Aka a look at Nicolò's life before Yusuf.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: You Are That Which I Worship [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2034562
Comments: 13
Kudos: 91





	Simplicity

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all! I just want to say that I had some help from @historic-old-guard-lover on tumblr and if you, like me, are fascinated by trans people throughout history you might enjoy this article they linked me [HERE](https://www.publicmedievalist.com/transgender-middle-ages/).

When Nicolò was five, he thought the world a simple place. His days consisted of nothing more than wandering the muddy streets and playing swords with the local boys. He was good at it, quick on his feet and unrelenting with his swings. He sent more than one of them home to their mothers with tears in their eyes and welts on their arms, and would only shrug when his own mother inevitably came by to scold him. It wasn’t his fault that they moved so slow. It wasn’t his fault they cried.

His mother would sigh when he said this, every time, without fail. She always seemed so old in those moments, exhausted beyond her years, especially as she begged for him to _play with the other girls, please, just for once_ , holding his face in her calloused hands.

He never liked it when she asked that. He had never thought of himself as one of the girls. Sure, he was one of a pair of sisters, and he didn’t necessarily mind being a sister to little Giovanna, but as the elder child he’d always felt as if his age was more important. He was a protector, first and foremost. He was a warrior. And that meant to fight, to stand strong and tall and plant his feet before an advancing enemy, to never back down in the face of those who would take what was rightfully his. 

Still, his mother would not relent. “Please, sweet, for me,” she would say. And he would nod, because he loved his mother and he didn’t want to get in trouble, but he never managed to get far before he would take up his wooden sword once more, bounding down the streets in hot pursuit of the boys. 

He thought, in the way that children think, that this would never end. Simple.

***

When Nicolò was fourteen, he thought the world an enormous place. There was so much out there, so much that he had never seen—he would hang around the merchants who passed through the town, greedy eyes taking in the maps they carried and listening to the tales they told of far off places. There were days when he wanted nothing more than to pull on his boots, ratty though they were, and begin walking. Out of the village and toward the city… it seemed like a beautiful dream, at a time when the nights consisted of his mother crying long past the setting of the sun. 

“Your father is taking care of her now,” she would say, when Nicolò crept into her room late at night, the candle burning in the window. “May their souls rest together in heaven.”

And Nicolò would nod, having lost the title of ‘sister’ for good, his chest ringing with pain like a bell struck by iron. He didn’t know how to reconcile the ache of loss, to contend with the bitter knowledge that he had never been a very good sister at all, not when he could not protect Giovanna— _little Gianna_ —from the illness that took her life. All he knew was that the world was large, and the distance vast, and surely, _surely_ he could out-pace the memories if he set off now.

So he did. He didn’t know his letters so he left no note, simply packed a bag full of food and left a flower in his cup for his mother to find. He was gone before the dawn crested the trees. 

It took several hours to reach the next village on foot. He swallowed, hard, as he knocked on the door of the seamstress that the farmer on the corner had pointed him toward. When she answered, he had a lie ready— _my mother sent me for clothes for my brother_ , he said. At her shrewd look, Nicolò passed along the few coins that he’d managed to collect over the years, and told the woman that his brother was very close in size to he himself.

She seemed unconvinced, but money was money—she spent a few days working, during which time he helped milk cows and feed pigs at the nearby farms, unafraid of the dirt and muck. He slept on the floor of the barn of the farmer on the corner, his satchel under his head, and when the seamstress handed him the finished clothes he thanked her earnestly.

He left their village that same day, heading off again. A few minutes away from their homes and shops, when he could no longer hear the sounds of the cows mooing across the fields at each other, he veered off the road and into the woods.

The clothes fit very well, after he cinched a spare bit of fabric tight around his chest and shoulders underneath. Much better than he’d hoped. He swallowed, running a hand down his front. He wasn’t well endowed, too young and too skinny to have a particularly large bust, but it was strange to have no emphasis on his chest. He thought of Giovanna, all of twelve years old, wasting away in her bed. He shook his head. Then he knelt in the dirt and began to dig, prying stones from the mud as he went until the hole was big enough to fit the dress he had been wearing for the past few days. He smoothed the mud back over it, pressing it down until it was flat again.

It was the first piece of clothing he buried. It would not be the last.

***

When Nicolò was twenty, he thought the world a complicated place. He was always finding new ways in which his knowledge came up short, always puzzled by some manner of courtesy that he’d never learned. There were people in the city who looked down at him, at the ragged wool trousers and the thick linen shirts he wore, and sneered. He saw men high up on horses saddled with the finest leather, men with fox-fur round their velvet capes and their clothing dyed in beautiful colors, and could not understand the perspective from which they viewed the world. It was nothing like the view from the dusty streets, from farms and homes where every member of the family worked hard labor tirelessly dawn to dusk. 

Nicolò knew that struggle, that labor. He had grown up with it, had watched it harden his mother’s hands year after year. He knew how to work a farm, knew how to card wool and spin yarn, though he’d never quite got the hang of sewing. The only day off was Sunday, the Lord’s day—and that day was set aside for church services and prayer. 

Watching the nobility trot past on their steeds, Nicolò paused with his broom suspended at the front of the church. Not long after he arrived in the city, when he was still without home and had no clothes besides his work clothes to attend mass, he was approached by the priest to ask if he had family. He’d said yes, but far away. The priest had then asked if he knew his letters. Nicolò had said no, but he’d love to learn. The priest was old, and bent, and kind—he offered to teach Nicolò how to read. _It is something every man should know_ , the priest said. He believed that every man deserved to read the holy book for themselves, to experience God’s word first-hand.

It was here that Nicolò truly fell in love with the name _Nicol_ _ò_ , tracing the letters on paper as he etched the sounds into his mind. He’d picked it out in a panic in the first town that he found himself with his new clothes, having forgotten that his given name would not match. It was the first man’s name that came to mind, that of his late father. He’d swallowed, and hoped that it wasn’t a sin to take your father’s name when it didn’t belong to you. But here, in the city, watching the ink take shape beneath his pen, he felt like he had earned it, somehow.

He was Nicolò, and he had started to carve out a place in the world. He was happy.

***

When Nicolò was twenty-five, he thought the world a harsh place. He’d followed in the old priest’s footsteps, becoming an alter server and rising up through the hierarchy of the church, learning more and more about the world as he went. And the more he learned, the more he found that it was all the same. The illness that had taken his sister ran rampant through the streets here. Sickness and death, famine and drought—they were pervasive, the bony grip of the grim reaper sliding skeletal hands up the back of his neck as he tended to orphans at the parish. He passed beggars in the streets and he pressed the few coins he had to his name into their waiting hands. It never changed the numbers of them, all lined up, starving, against the church walls. He’d thought, years ago, that the city would be different from his home village—and it was, but only in the way that the suffering seemed so much larger, the scope of it surpassing that which he had known as a child. 

He wanted to protect them. He wanted to fight for them. But most of all, he wanted, more than anything, to see his mother.

“Go,” the priest said, from his deathbed. His shaking hands held Nicolò’s own, fragile skin pressing against Nicolò’s rough palms. “She misses you. The parish will still be here when you return.”

The priest passed later that night, with Nicolò and the rest of the clergy and laity at his side. Nicolò felt the ring of grief in his chest once again, and once again he packed a satchel in the dead of night, but this time… this time he did not run. Not really. Instead he retraced his path, and he went home.

His mother was grayer than he remembered, her mouth drawn with frown lines. He wore an alb, long and dark and cinched with a belt at the waist. Her eyes were piercing as she looked him over.

“I’m not sure I can help you, Father,” she said, at long last, and Nicolò nearly broke there. He swallowed hard and straightened, an inch or so taller than her.

“I’m sorry to intrude,” he said, and he saw the moment that it clicked together in the gears of her mind, the man standing in front of her and the elder child, the only child, who ran away so many years ago. He wondered what she must think of him, of a rural girl who has dressed herself up as a man, taking up the mantle of manhood, priesthood, the name of her father like it was her own.

He got his answer a moment later as she threw her arms around him. 

“You don’t think me wrong?” he asked, as she wept into his shoulder. He could not help the fact that he sounded like a child waiting to get in trouble. He had felt it often enough through the years.

But she shook her head, stroking his hair. “You are my child,” she said. “It does not matter if you are my son or my daughter, so long as you are righteous. _Be righteous, sweet, and you will find salvation_.”

He held her, and he let her hold him, and he hoped that he would make her proud.

***

When Nicolò was twenty-seven, he thought the world a sinful place. Nicolò had always tried to be an optimist, but it was the opinion of many people in his village, his mother included, that the end of the world was nigh. A reckoning, a revelation… one marked by the streak of lights, meteors, cutting through the night skies. God had a plan, God had a reason, and what reason for drought and famine and sickness and death could there be but the sin of people? It seemed only logical.

The Pope, he soon came to find, was of a similar opinion. It came to Nicolò’s attention soon after he took up a position as junior priest at the parish in the city that the Pope had begun a call to arms, asking his constituents to come together to drive out the Muslim presence from the holy land. Nicolò walked through the streets and he heard men preaching from makeshift pedestals, saw peasants and clergy and knights alike sewing crosses onto their clothes to take the holy land in the name of God. And as he did, he began to think, well… was he really needed here? What use was it to preach to those who were already on a pious path? It wasn’t the christians’ fault that the world was in such pain. 

Nicolò paused, in the middle of the street. He took a deep breath. He thought about wooden sword fights on muddy streets, of burying a dress and smoothing the mud overtop, of his father’s name taking shape under his pen and becoming his own, of his mother’s words. _Be righteous_ , she had said, her voice fraught with pain and grief but also with hope and love.

It was then, with those words ringing in his mind higher and sweeter and more powerful than even the grief of losing a sister, that Nicolò approached the preaching man and asked to join the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

***

Nicolò is now twenty-eight. He doesn’t know what to make of the world anymore. He’s seen death and carnage and blood running through the streets of a supposedly holy city and he doesn’t understand. Why has he died so many times over and yet still is not dead? How can a muslim heathen fall beneath his sword only to get back up again moments later? He cannot reconcile it in his mind. If his immortality is a gift from God, then why is his enemy similarly gifted? If it is a curse from the heathens, then why is his enemy similarly cursed? Nothing makes sense anymore, if it ever did.

This is, admittedly, partly due to the blood loss making his head swim.

Only for a moment, though. The world only spins around him for one long moment before it begins to right itself again. He shudders as his body heals, clumsily raising his sword only to be met by a harsh string of words in the heathen’s native tongue and another swipe from his sword.

Nicolò grunts. What once was fury at an enemy that wouldn’t die is now something closer to exhaustion. He won’t give up, will never give up, but he has gotten somewhat careless. Ever since the siege of Jerusalem he’s been reeling, his footing off and his aim amiss. He feels like he’s walking through fog, like his eyes won’t focus and his movement is stifled. He doesn’t remember taking off his armor to expose the tunic underneath. He doesn’t remember how many times he’s died. He doesn’t remember how long they have fought and how long they have killed each other.

He doesn’t know how far he’s strayed from God’s will. 

It hurts. To be bereft of God, of the holy mission he undertook… it _hurts_. But not as much as the sword does, as it pierces his shoulder and carves a wound across his chest.

Nicolò stifles a scream, reaching involuntarily for the blade. His hand bleeds where he grips it, trying futilely to pry it free. The heathen’s face snarls down at him, black eyes brimming with fatigue and fury, both, all at once. Nicolò expects to die. He expects to fall. He expects to rise again. 

Except he doesn’t. Instead, the heathen’s eyes go wide, staring down below his blade. He wrenches the sword back all at once, prompting Nicolò to wail involuntarily. Nicolò clutches at his shoulder, at the wound—but it’s already closing, flesh knitting together beneath his bloody fingers.

The same cannot be said for his tunic.

He’s been lucky, up until now. It was easy enough to hide his body from the men he marched with. No one knew him from before he wore men’s clothes, and thus no one questioned who— _what_ —he was. 

Of course it couldn’t last. And of course it would be here, and now, with an enemy, that his secret comes out.

Nicolò winces, bloody hands gripping the torn edges of his tunic and holding them together. He’s exposed, his undergarments in a similar state of disarray, and he can see even as he bows his head and throws himself back and away that the heathen is gaping. Cursing in his own tongue, Nicolò berates himself for his carelessness. It won’t be long now before his enemy strikes him down once more, this time thinking he’s a woman. Or possibly the man _won_ _’t_ strike him down, _because_ he thinks him a woman. Nicolò spits, glaring up at the heathen—he doesn’t know which is worse, but he’s about to find out.

It takes a long moment. The heathen shifts, sword rising and falling with his labored breath, for several ticks of an unheard clock. Then, frowning, he steps back, using one hand to unclasp the cloak from around his shoulders. He says something in that same jarring tongue, slowly holding the cloak out, gesturing with it. The implication is clear—he wants Nicolò to cover himself.

 _So it_ _’ll be the latter_ , Nicolò thinks, his lip rising in a snarl. He’s moving almost before he consciously decides it, knocking the heathen’s hand and the cloak in it aside before he drives his sword square into the center of his stomach. The heathen gasps, his eyes going wide. Nicolò wrenches his sword free and the heathen slowly sinks to the ground below, the life leaving his eyes.

Is is then, and only then, that Nicolò realizes what he’s done. How he saw an enemy who dared show a sliver of kindness… and struck him down.

The guilt, the _anger_ , hits him like a brick to the gut. He thought his cause holy, thought his fight righteous, but _this_? This is _anything but_. He’s not sure who he’s more furious with—the heathen, for daring to show kindness? God, for putting this man in his path? Or himself, for failing them both? 

Nicolò looks up to the heavens, to the clear blue sky and the scattered clouds above, as if an answer will be found there. But no answer comes, and the heathen will come back soon. There is no escaping this. 

Nicolò sighs. Then he sits himself down, kneeling in the bloody sand with his fists pressed to his knees and his head bowed, his sword abandoned at his side. He waits, in the silence of an empty battlefield, for the heathen—the _man_ —to rise again, his wound having healed, scarless and smooth, once more.

It happens a moment later. The man first twitches, his eyes roving beneath closed lids. Then, all at once, he sucks in a deep, gasping breath and shoots up from the sand, hands pawing at the place the mortal wound was. He turns, his face twisting in fury as he rises clumsily to his feet. He barks something harsh, stumbling back and raising his sword, pointing it at Nicolò’s head.

Nicolò doesn’t move. “I know,” he says. “I know. I attacked a man who didn’t attack first.” Then, raising his head and baring his throat, he locks eyes with the man. “I wronged you. Take your shot.”

Nicolò isn’t sure how much he can understand of Genoese, but it’s clearly more than Nicolò understands of his foreign tongue, because at the words the man’s eyes go wide. Still, he doesn’t move to act.

Tilting his head farther back, Nicolò closes his eyes. “Well?” he says. “Do it now. I won’t offer again.”

Still, nothing happens. Nicolò waits, and waits, but the bite of metal in flesh does not come. He squints one eye open—perhaps the man wants to look him in the eye as he dies. 

Except the man… he’s lowered his weapon. He kneels on one knee in front of Nicolò, slow and careful. He raises his hand, and in that hand is his cloak, and, in one simple motion, he offers it once more. 

“Fix,” he says in Genoese, gesturing at Nicolò’s torn tunic. His accent is thick, his tongue slow as he speaks the words. “Tonight, rest, no killing.”

Nicolò frowns. Is he supposed to just trust this man, his immortal enemy, not to murder him brutally in his sleep? But he bared his throat and the man did not kill him—perhaps there is some honor to these people after all. And what does it matter, anyway, if he will not die in the end? He deserves to suffer the pain of death for all he’s done, all the wrongs he’s committed. He does not deserve kindness. He does not deserve something as small or as profound as an offered cloak.

But he is tired, and he is weak, and he doesn’t want to shed blood again. Not tonight. 

He takes the cloak. A simple act. And that is the beginning of it all.

**Author's Note:**

> If you read this and you want to guide me to more historically accurate information, please feel free! In the meantime, let me know what you think!
> 
> Edit: just learned that Joe wouldn't have had a scimitar at this time.


End file.
